This is a terrific disc. Right from the very first bars of the invigorating Water Music Symphony (1984), one is drawn irresistibly into Larsen’s sound world and left in no doubt that here is a composer who has made the art of symphonic writing very much her own. On the evidence of the present collection, I would suggest her principal musical antecedents to be Sibelius, Stravinsky and the American symphonic composers of the mid-twentieth century (such as Schuman and Harris). But there is much more that is distinctively her own, and the result is a muse full of zest and vim.
True, Water Music is more a sinfonietta than a symphony, but it is very accomplished none the less. One can almost ‘hear liquid’, as it were, and this is the finest water music since Respighi’s Fountains. I have no qualms abut the status of the Third Symphony (1991, not 1995 as listed on the cover), which is an electric score. Presuming Water Music to be No. 1, I have found no trace of a Second (only these two are listed in Contemporary Composers – St James’s Press; Chicago and London: 1992); neither the booklet nor her publisher’s London agent could help here. Ring of Fire (1995) is no less involving, a brilliant tone-poem inspired by lines from T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding (compare George Benjamin’s Ringed by the flat horizon, deriving from The Waste Land). The performances from the LSO – on top form – take wing, with everyone clearly at home with the idiom. Very strongly recommended.'